Country of Cold (7 page)

His first idea was to have us compete as a team somehow, like the Genocidal Geminis on TV wrestling. Albert was mortified. “No, Terry. No, no, no, no. We won’t even consider it,” he said, leaning back from the table, gesturing with his tub of fried stuff.

Terry looked crestfallen.

“When exactly were you thinking of having this thing?” I asked.

Albert looked at me, appalled.

“Canada Day,” Terry said, brightening.

“How would the rules work?”

Albert put his head down on the plastic table. At the counter Daphne Hainscotter wrinkled her nose. She’d have to wipe down that table, later.

And the next thing I knew Terry bet eight hundred dollars on me with Harold Simpson, the owner of Dunsmuir Florists. Terry and Harold had a rivalry going way back, something about Harold’s ex-wife, since departed (for Montreal), and the Fun Mountain Water Slides. The details were obscure to me, only hinted at by my mother, who would then declare that we really shouldn’t be talking about other people’s business. The matter apparently had made for pretty interesting Chamber of Commerce meetings.

There was no way on earth that Terry was going to lose this bet and endure the consequent humiliation from Harold. My natural talents notwithstanding, he started me on a training regimen. After I closed up at the gas station, I would cross the street to the now darkened DQ. The back door would be left open for me and I would feel my way through the food prep area, around the grills and coolers, and emerge in the darkened Customer Service Zone. Terry would be waiting for me there, drinking rye whisky out of a milkshake cup,
smoking cigars. Before him would sit half a dozen splits. And a stopwatch.

The secret, we established, was learning to avoid the maraschino cherries. You’re already asking quite a bit of your poor gut—all that ice cream, the bananas, of course, the sauce, the sprinkly bits—and then you bite down on that maraschino cherry and that sticky red syrup hits the hangy-down thing at the back of your throat and, well, game over. So the technique we devised ended up with me going down on the ice cream mound and sliding the cherry off with the back of my spoon, taking up the scoop of ice cream in one bite and then knocking the next cherry down into the pool of melting ice cream. In the heat and fuss of the contest, we agreed, no one would notice. This technique emerged over long weeks of practice and stopwatching. It gave me new respect for the subtleties of things, the details you never notice.

Waiting for the morning bus that spring, Albert asked me over and over if I was really going to go through with it. Hell, how was I to know? “Yes, I really am going to go through with it,” I said. After which a couple more cars would roar past us, down the highway. Luckier kids than us, taking their cars to school.

“You’re being humiliated, you know.”

“Am I.”

“I just can’t see why you’re doing this.”

“Because maybe you don’t know everything, or even me, half as much as you think you do.”

He stared at this wounding. I fished out a cigarette and shifted on my seat on the mailbox. The school bus pulled up. We both got on, and stared out the windows.

The week before the contest, Terry put me on a fast: saltine crackers and water. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, eyes opening wide, smiling my best I’m-in-the-company-of-a-madman smile.

“Not even a french fry,” he said to Daphne and the rest of the counter girls, who all looked on sympathetically. Who could be so unkind to a poor deformed baby pig? “And I’m just across the street. I’ll know if a pizza car pulls up,” he added, as I slumped out of the Dairy Queen and back to the gas station. Saltines. Jeez.

Which isn’t to say that I subscribed completely to his rules, but in that week I still didn’t take in anything like the quantity of food that my swelling body was used to—I felt weak and unsteady, I verged constantly on passing out. In history class I held a cloth to my face, across the room from Albert, who sat reading
Das Kapital
, completely oblivious to Miss Lindsay and her end-of-year ruminations on what really was the matter with young people today.

The weekend of the contest our parents decided to go visit relatives in northern Alberta. “Why do you suppose that would be?” Albert asked me, after this news
had been relayed to us. I shrugged. There was really only one response: the neighbours spoke in scandalized terms, for years after, of the damage wrought upon their flower beds, the front lawn. They could only imagine what our house looked like inside, after. That was for sure.

I remember a few things. I remember talking to my friend Lester Phillipson in the garden about summer peas and how there likely wasn’t anything better in the world, and him agreeing. I remember, I would be reminded of, the eleven—some accounts say thirteen—bottles of beer. I remember dancing in the front garden with some of Albert’s friends, who were enacting
Le Sacre du Printemps
, me not understanding, but being indulged as one of the hosts anyway. I remember pressing twenty dollars into the hands of my sober friend Ross Paddock and insisting that he go down to the Kentucky Fried and get me—me who had been subsisting on half rations for a week—a barrel of Kentucky Fried Chicken, two whole chickens, a tray of those rolls that turn into paste on the roof of your mouth, a carton of the grey gravy, a mound of the sweet-as-molasses coleslaw. I remember all that.

Waking up on the front lawn. Sun. Hot. Thin film of perspiration stinging everywhere. Musty mouth. Throbbing red-hued world.

Mid-afternoon. Oh. My. God. The contest started. Ten minutes ago. The lawn lurching as I find my feet, my shoes, what are these
eggshells
doing here? Jesus God. Keys in truck. That was a mistake, starts. My God, fifteen minutes late already.

Pulling to a stop in front of the Dairy Queen. Big crowd all watching Floyd, the Dunsmuir Florists entry. Floyd, who was three hundred pounds easy and from way north of town but who had quit school in grade ten and so had almost been forgotten about, so rarely did we see him in town anymore, Floyd was starting to—rumble. The crowd grimaced and groaned and stood back a little. He had eaten seven banana splits. The eighth was in front of him, melting into a row of concentric circles of ice cream and syrup and sprinkly bits. And bananas and maraschino cherries.

Terry leaning into my face and barking, “You turkey!” Me blinking. Propelled through the crowd. Out of which appears a picnic table with a placard with my name on it. Melting banana splits lined up in rows. And then I’m sitting at the picnic table and everybody is still watching Floyd and nobody even realizes I’m a contestant, just Terry staring at me, looking betrayed, and then I start eating. I remember looking around as my head bent and my arm began scooping—push off the cherry, scoop, scoop, push off the cherry, scoop, scoop—and the crowd chatting and watching Floyd out of the corner of their eyes, warily, and I finished
one and started on another without even a breath. This was just muscle memory now. So many darkened nights inside, Terry smoking his cigar, me slurping—push off the cherry, slurp, slurp, push off the cherry, slurp, slurp—there wasn’t even any consideration involved in it anymore, just my mouth opening and closing, swallowing. And then I was on my third and the crowd began turning to watch me and I was just a blur now, one windmilling arm and a stream of ice cream arching into my mouth and two halves of a banana besides. And by the fourth they were starting to clap with each spoonful—push off the cherry, scoop, clap, scoop, clap, push off the cherry—I’d never eaten like this in training and I was only accelerating. And by the fifth they were chanting
Bob, Bob
, with each scoop. And when I reached for the sixth the dads were holding their children above the heads of the crowd to see, and I saw out of the corner of my eye Daphne Hainscotter, standing in the front row, wearing her pink sundress, and oh my goodness, she was smiling wide right at me and my arm just whirled faster and my mouth sputtered and engulfed all the faster and I saw her and she was looking right at me. Daphne Hainscotter, shy and dignified, with
such
posture. Daphne, who in twelve years of attending school with me might have said ten words to me, news it was to me she even recognized my existence, and there she was, smiling right at me. Daphne.

And now the crowd was going crazy and Floyd knew he had to do something and kept picking up his spoon and sort of waving it but he wasn’t going nowhere. And I whirled through the seventh and there it was, the eighth, all I had was one more, and Terry was bellowing, “Right on, Bob!” and all the DQ staff were there and now they were waving picket signs Terry had made them make up, saying
EAT BOB, EAT
and
BITE THAT BANANA
, and I held it up before the crowd triumphantly and set it down—the crowd loved that little bit of theatrics—and I picked up my spoon and looked right at Daphne, who yelled out,
“Go Bob!”
at the top of her shy and dignified lungs, and I looked right at her and smiled and she smiled too and I scooped a spoonful of ice cream. And bit down. On a maraschino cherry.

The arc of partially melted ice cream, bananas, sprinkly bits, and syrup shone like a rainbow, such was its multihued splendour. My head was a mortar tube, recoiling with successive discharges, and the first three rows of spectators were enveloped in a barrage of splits and Kentucky Fried Chicken and rolls that had turned to paste and grey gravy and coleslaw. And my paroxysm-racked body coiled and spun like a dropped fire hose and then I was on all fours and the river of rapidly liquefying ice cream was running down the sloped front lawn of the DQ and again and again and again, my eyes were shut. And finally someone put a wastebasket under me. And I nearly filled that too and finally there was
nothing more. And it was dry heaving and it felt as though my body was turning inside out like a sport sock and then, nothing. I closed my eyes and groaned. A hand was on the small of my back, another on my shoulders. I reached into the garbage basket and picked out my glasses. I lifted my head and turned to her. Him.

“How are you doing?” Albert asked, smiling gently.

I nodded.

“Wanna go home?”

I nodded.

We stood and someone called my name and I looked around for her and the photographer from the
Dunsmuir Enterprise
leaned into me and flashed my photo, which ran on the front page that week under the headline “Miracle Comeback Pukes Out.”

And Albert took me home and cleared some room among the beer bottles and put me to bed. I spent the rest of that weekend lying there, listening to him clean up.

The Dunsmuir and District Community Hall is used for dances, auctions, parades on rainy days, and particularly popular funerals. Albert and I had been in it probably a hundred times before our high school graduation dance.

The decorations committee, headed by Patti Nixon, six feet tall, three wide, and hair like Betty Crocker’s
Creamy Vanilla Icing, did a fine job all that week beforehand, disappearing from the imponderably slow late-June-after-exam classes. In those languid days the decoration committee’s excuses were not challenged, even when they returned in their boyfriends’ cars drunk and voluble. The teachers competed with us students in distractibility, those last weeks: the college kids were already identified as such and they knew where they were heading and what really mattered. Which was to say: not this. And for the rest, the same. Nothing could have seemed to have less to do with the rest of our lives than those last weeks of empty silent hallways and lockers being cleaned out. There were half a dozen weddings planned for that summer; when the teachers shook their heads about these the maids of honour rankled indignantly. The brides said nothing at all, just sat there, frozen.

And my brother, who had learned that he hadn’t after all won the chemistry prize or the history prize, but was headed off to a scholarship and an apartment of his own nevertheless, was suddenly possessed of an equanimity serene and confident, looking evenly at and smiling widely in the faces of the puffed-up gym teachers and princes and princesses of fashion in the cafeteria.

Every day in the shop that week Mr. Budwinski excused himself even earlier than was his habit and my friend Lester and I would make our way out to Lester’s car in the student parking lot. Lester had decided to
join the air force and had gotten his letter of offer a month previously; he knew for sure where he was headed. We sat out there in our smoky haze, considering our futures and the ripped interior of Lester’s ’64 Malibu four-door.

“The thing is.” Cough. “Life is way. Longer. Than we think.” Cough. “Here you go. We’re so young we think that each moment is absolutely crucial. But life is long and you’re allowed to change your mind. Thanks. If you don’t. Like your first choice. You do something else.”

“I guess.”

“You’re not getting uptight about all this graduation stuff, are you?”

“No, no.”

“Because you shouldn’t, you know.”

“I’m not.”

“Good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you suppose they get these mirrors to stick to the windshield so well?”

“Krazy Glue?”

“Ever see one fall off?”

“Never.”

“Got anything to eat in here?”

On the night of the graduation, Lester surprised us all by bringing Charlene Goffman. Brain-stallingly pretty, she had to be the surliest creature imaginable—at least
within the hearty and false collegiality of our small-prairie-town frames of references. She had passed twelve years of public education in a nearly continual sulk. In the ninth grade she had made it nearly to January without smiling. She walked in that night with such disdain etched upon her features you’d have thought she had soiled herself. And when Lester came up to me before the dinner, eyebrows raised, rented tuxedo and scarlet bow tie still pressed and crisp, I held out my palms in mute astonishment. I hunched my shoulders to underscore my question.

“I know. But she said yes.”

Even my brother was accompanied by crazy-as-a-coyote Cora, who dressed always in black, smoked Gitanes, lived in her own apartment in town, and had been only tenuously affiliated with the school for the last two years but who, in one of those spring-of-grade-twelve triumphs of pragmatism over principal, was graduated anyway. Cora had come over and met my delighted parents that afternoon, even asking my mother for the recipe for her strawberry trifle, my brother snorting into his hand, Mother looking at him, “Now don’t you be rude, Albert,” and later, in the kitchen to me: “Isn’t it
wonderful?”
Cora, with her cat’s-eye sunglasses and green lamé dress, pumps glittering, spoke more words that afternoon than I’d heard her utter in twelve years of shared stupor in the Lord Dunsmuir school system.